Perfect Recipes for Durga Puja

It’s Durga Puja, when families come together, the fragrance of kash flowers fills the air and artisans are hard at work creating beautiful figurines of the goddess Durga.

The festival is to Bengal what Christmas or Thanksgiving is to America.

According to Hindu mythology, Durga is the daughter of Himalaya, lord of the mountains, and his wife Menaka. She is married to Shiva, the ascetic god who lives in the mountain kingdom of Kailash. Once a year, she returns to her parent’s home with her children for three days. There she is spoilt rotten with food, festivities and pomp. On the fourth day she returns to her husband’s home.

Durga is not a pushover or just a dutiful daughter and obedient wife. She is usually depicted standing with one foot on a lion’s back and another on the dead body of the demon Mahishasur, who she killed to save the world from evil. She has 10 arms, each carrying a weapon.

Durga Puja is a community festival where every locality has a canopied enclosure called a pandal with statues of the goddess and her children, all deities in their own right. People gather in these pandals to pray, hang out, buy clothes and eat.

I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but I love Durga Puja because it allows me the joy of spending time with my extended and very boisterous family. I come from a town called Guptipara, near Kolkata. My ancestors were Zamindars – yes I know, we were the cursed landed gentry, but we were benevolent rulers, I promise.

This is where the first Barowari (baro means 12 and wari means friends) puja began, in the Sen family home. In 1790, 12 friends got together and celebrated a joint puja for the first time. It is from this that Durga Puja became a community celebration. Prior to that it was a private affair, where each house celebrated its own puja.

There are four main days of Durga Puja: Saptami, Ashthami, Nabami and Bijaya Dashami.

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Ashthami, the second day, is considered the most important day of the festival, where the devout eat only vegetarian food. This includes a lunch of rice and pulses called khichudi, which is the consistency of risotto. Dinner is puffed golden luchis with a spiced potato curry – alur dam – and a split pea dal called chholar dal.

Nabami, the third day, is when the vegetarians turn carnivorous with a vengeance, eating mutton cooked without the usual ingredients of onion or garlic. This is one of my favorite recipes and I’ve shared it in my article on cooking without onion.

The last day, Bijaya Dashami, is when the goddess is supposed to leave for her husband’s home and her statue is immersed in the Ganges. Some people make chutney called ambal from the stalks of water lilies. This day is known for desserts and candies, such as patishapta, a pancake stuffed with sweetened desiccated coconut.

Here are some recipes for my favorite food cooked on each day of the festival:

Luchi (fried puffed bread to be eaten with chholar dal and alur dam):

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon ghee

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons water

Vegetable oil (for deep frying)

Put the flour in a large bowl. Make a small hole in the middle. Pour in the ghee and salt and mix by hand for a minute.

Slowly add the water. Keep kneading the flour, making dough similar to the consistency of pasta dough. Let the dough sit for 30 minutes.

Grease the platform on which you will roll out the round luchis. Take a rolling pin and roll the dough into a flat even sheet around 1/3 inch thick. Take a round bowl of around four inches in diameter and cut pancake shapes out of the dough.

In a deep pan, pour enough vegetable oil to deep fry every disc of flour.

When the oil heats up, place in one disc at a time. Press the disc down slightly into the oil, so that it is immersed properly. The disc will start puffing up with air.

When fully puffed, turn the disc over. Brown the other side for a few seconds and remove from the pan. Drain the excess oil on a paper towel. This should be served immediately or it becomes rubbery.

Chholar dal (split pea dal):

200 grams/1 cup Bengal gram/chholar dal

1/2 cup chopped coconut

2 tablespoons of ginger paste

1 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 teaspoon coriander powder

1 teaspoon sugar

4 dried whole red chili

3 tablespoons mustard oil

1 tablespoon ghee

Soak the pulses in a bowl of water for at least 30 minutes. Place the drained pulses and salt in a pressure cooker with two cups of water and cook until at least three whistles. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, cook on a medium flame until the dal softens but doesn’t disintegrate.

Remove from the flame. Once cooled, add ginger paste, cumin, turmeric, coriander, chili powder, sugar and mix well with the dal.

In a separate pan, add oil and fry the coconut pieces (I usually skip the coconut, but people seem to love it.) Once the coconut is brownish, remove from the pan.

In the same oil, add the chilies and fry until they turn dark brown. Pour in the boiled dal. It will splutter. If it seems too thick, add a dash of water. This is a thickish dal the consistency of porridge.

Top the dal with the ghee and the browned coconut pieces.

Patishapta (crêpes stuffed with desiccated sweetened coconut):

For the filling:

1 coconut – desiccated/grated

250 grams brown sugar

Mix the two ingredients. Take a pan and cook the mixture with no oil over a medium flame. The mixture will become a little sticky and a caramel fragrance will come out of the pan.

Powder two green cardamoms, remove the husks and add to the mixture. Remove from the pan. As the mixture cools, roll into 12-13 tiny balls, which should then be made into cylindrical shapes four inches long.

For the crêpe:

250 grams flour

2 tablespoons ghee or peanut oil

250 ml water

2 tablespoons sugar

Mix the ingredients to form a liquid consistent enough to hold shape. Take a frying pan and grease it slightly with vegetable oil. Place the pan on a medium flame and use a ladle to pour a pancake or crêpe sized disc.

Once one side has browned, take the mixture you prepared for the filling and place on the center of the crêpe. Roll both sides over the mixture like an envelope and flatten it slightly with the ladle.

Flip the crêpe. Remove from the pan in a minute.

You can also make a kheer of thickened milk to pour on the pancakes.

Kheer:

1 liter milk

200 grams sugar, or more if you like it sweeter

Boil the milk in a pan on medium flame until it reduces to half. Stir in the sugar. Leave to cool. It will thicken and can be drizzled on the pancakes.

Kheer is also served separately as a dessert. After the kheer has cooled totally, you can add in chopped mangoes or the pulp of sweet tangerines. Make sure to do this only after the kheer has cooled, or the milk will split. Keep the kheer in the fridge before serving.

Rajyasree used to run the Bengali and Anglo-Indian restaurant, Brown Sahib, and has a catering outfit called Food for Thought . You can follow her on Twitter @Rajyasree. Click here to read her previous posts on India Real Time.

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